People use language to communicate. Thus, language is always used for a purpose and always takes place in a real world context. The human brain evolved to support this type of processing, deriving from more primitive systems for sensation and movement, on one hand, and emotion and socialization, on the other. The phylogeny of this system has led to a diffuse neuroanatomy of language and a neurophysiology that interacts closely with both the more primitive systems as well as the more recent systems for attending, remembering, problem solving, and reasoning. The goal of this proposal is to integrate these two themes, the behavioral aspect (language as a cognitive and social system for purposeful communication) and the neurobiological aspect (language as a collection of interactive multi-system neural mechanisms) into an approach to the study of the functional neuroanatomy of language. The organizing principle of the present proposal is the study of language in context. By context, we include many aspects of situated language, including the physical environment (the sounds, face, and hands of the speaker), the natural alterations that occur in this environment (noise, multiple speakers), the pragmatic setting (the goals of the speaker and hearer), the social milieu (emotions), the linguistic setting (previous words and sentences), and lastly the biological setting (brain injury). Although we do not propose to study interactive dialogue, we instead focus on another natural use of language, discourse, commonly used to recall events, express ideas, explain phenomena, describe procedures, and exclaim emotional states. Our five specific aims address the neuroanatomy of language in experimental settings designed to approximate natural and ecologically valid discourse comprehension, and to do so in as integrated a way as possible, given the methodological constraints of experimental design and image analysis for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
These aims focus on the understanding of language in contexts that represent real-world variations in communicative situations to which people naturally adjust. To achieve these goals, we propose several innovations in experimental design for functional MRI, which will allow these investigations to be conducted in simulated environments of situated, ecologically valid, cognition, and interpreted with a view of distributed networks of brain activation.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 41 publications
